For those of you who have been waiting to use Google Storage, were happy to announce that effective immediately, you can get a Google Storage for Developers account without needing to request an invitation.

Weve also launched several significant enhancements to the service, including more flexible and powerful security features, simplified sharing, the ability to store data in Europe, support for larger objects (up to 5 TB), team-oriented accounts and a completely free promotional tier.

OAuth 2.0 Support
OAuth 2.0 is the new recommended Google Storage authentication and authorization scheme. OAuth 2.0 is an industry standard that weve adopted across Google, offering many benefits:

Simpler  never sign a request again! OAuth 2.0 uses access tokens for authentication, which obviate the need for complicated signature schemes. We recommend that all OAuth 2.0-authenticated requests be made over SSL.
More flexible and powerful  OAuth 2.0 allows for three-legged authentication, where a user can grant an application permission to access Google Storage on their behalf (and revoke the grant at any time if necessary).
Secure
Your user name and password are used once to create a long-lived (refresh) token which is scoped to allow access to Google Storage o behalf of that account. Your user name and password never needs to live on disk.
You dont need to distribute your long-lived credentials to all the servers that need to access Google Storage. Instead, you can manage your long-lived credential centrally, and use it to create short-lived access tokens that you pass to your host cluster. This means that your long-lived tokens are safer.
You can revoke credentials at any time.

Learn more about using OAuth 2.0 with Google Storage for Developers here.

Simplified Sharing
Were happy to announce that your customers and partners no longer need to sign up for Google Storage in order to be able to access data that youve shared with them; you can now share data with anyone who has a Google account.

New Storage Region: Europe
In response to popular demand, effective immediately, were adding a new option for data location. You can now choose to store your data in Europe  and get the same high-performance, massively scalable, reliable service as you do when you store your data in the United States.

Regardless of which region you choose, your data will be replicated to multiple geographically diverse Google data centers within the region in order to provide high levels of availability and reliability.

Learn more here.

Team-oriented accounts
Google Storage now uses a team-oriented account model, which allows you to create and manage your account in a more natural way.

Weve moved to the Google API console for signup and administration, and adopted the same project-based account model that is used by other APIs. After creating a project, you configure billing for it once, and can then add any number of developers to it without requiring them to sign up for separate Google Storage accounts. This means individual developers on a team dont need to configure billing in order to use Google Storage. This change also makes Google Storage account management consistent with other Google APIs.

Since buckets are now associated with projects rather than individuals, you will need to specify the new x-goog-project-id header with your list-buckets and create-bucket API calls. However, your existing code will continue to work using your new default project that already owns all the buckets you created before we implemented project-based accounts. Learn more about projects and the backwards-compatible default project mechanism here.

Support for chunked transfer encoding
Google Storage now allows you to upload your data to Google Storage without knowing the object size in advance, using the standard HTTP chunked transfer encoding mechanism. Using this feature, you can stream data into Google Storage instead of buffering it on your own server before sending it to Google.

New API Version
In order to continue to innovate and deliver high-impact features, weve found the need to make some backwards-incompatible changes. In order to deliver these features while retaining backwards compatibility for existing code that doesnt need the new features, were introducing a new API version header. The new API version that implements this change is version 2. From version 2 onwards, all API calls will be versioned using the new x-goog-api-version header.

Version 2 of the Google Storage API does not support HMAC signature-based authentication. Although we strongly recommend that you move your code to use OAuth 2.0, explicitly specify the project ID when creating and listing buckets and use the new API version header, your existing code will continue to work; if you dont specify the API version in your request, your requests will still be handled by our old API.

Free Trial Use
Starting right now, all new accounts will receive a monthly free quota of:

Existing accounts will continue to receive 100 GB of free storage until the July 1, 2011 and, in addition, will also receive the same free bandwidth and requests as new accounts. On July 1, 2011, they will automatically move to the new plan.

The new promotional plan will be effective until Dec 31, 2011. Please note that promotional usage will only apply to a users first project that uses Google Storage (for existing users, this is the project that was automatically created for them during the account migration).

If youre an existing Google Storage for Developers user, thank you for using our product and for your valuable feedback that continues to help us evolve the service to meet your needs. As always, we continue to welcome your feedback in our discussion group. If you havent yet tried Google Storage, get your Google Storage account and get started for free today.

Navneet Joneja loves being at the forefront of the next generation of simple and reliable software infrastructure, the foundation on which next-generation technology is being built. When not working, he can usually be found dreaming up new ways to entertain his intensely curious one-year-old.